Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

of economic analysis, and used them to draw very different conclusions. Ricardo had made a distinction between use-value and exchange-value. The exchange-value of an object was something separate from its price and consisted of the amount of labour embodied in the objects of production, though Ricardo thought that the price in fact tended to approximate to the exchange-value. Thus - in contradistinction to later analyses - the value of an object was determined by the circumstances of production rather than those of demand. Marx took over these concepts, but, in his attempt to show that capitalism was not static but a historically relative system of class exploitation, supplemented Ricardo's views by introducing the idea of surplus-value. Surplus-value was defined as the difference between the value of the products of labour and the cost of producing that labour-power, i.e. the labourer's subsistence; for the exchange-value of labour-power was equal to the amount of labour necessary to reproduce that labour-power and this was normally much lower than the exchange-value of the products of that labour-power.

The theoretical part of Volume One divides very easily into three sections. The first section is a rewriting of the Critique of Political Economy of 1859 and analyses commodities, in the sense of external objects that satisfy human needs, and their value. Marx established two sorts of value - use value, or the utility of something, and exchange value which was determined by the amount of labour incorporated in the object. Labour was also of a twofold nature according to whether it created use values or exchange values. Since 'the exchange values of commodities must be capable of being expressed in terms of something common to them all,'192 and the only thing they shared was labour, then labour must be the source of value. But since evidently some people worked faster or more skilfully than others, this labour must be a sort of average 'socially necessary' labour time. There followed a difficult section on the form of value and the first chapter ended with an account of commodities as exchange values which he described as the 'fetishism of commodities' in a passage that recalls the account of alienation in the 'Paris Manuscripts' and (even more) the Note on James Mill. 'In order', said Marx here, 'to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands."95

The section ended with a chapter on exchange and an account of money as the means for the circulation of commodities, the material expression for their values and the universal measure of value.

The second section is a small one on the transformation of money

3i8 K A R L M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

into capital. Before the capitalist era people had sold commodities for money in order to buy more commodities. In the capitalist era, instead of selling to buy, people had bought to sell dearer: they had bought commodities with their money in order, by means of those commodities, to increase their money.

In the third section Marx introduced his key notion of surplus value, the idea that Engels characterised as Marx's principal 'discovery' in economics.194 Marx made a distinction between constant capital which was 'that part of capital which is represented by the means of production, by the raw material, auxiliary material and instruments of labour, and does not, in the process of production, undergo any quantitative alteration of value' and variable capital. Of this Marx said: 'That part of capital, represented by labour power, does, in the process of production, undergo an

be more or less according to the circumstances.'195 This variation was the rate of surplus value around which the struggle between workers and capitalists centred. T h e essential point was that the capitalist got the worker to work longer than was merely sufficient to embody in his product the value of his labour power: if the labour power of the worker (roughly what it cost to keep him alive and fit) was £3 a day and the worker could embody £3 of value in the product on which he was working in eight hours; then, if he worked ten hours, the last two hours would

During the second period of the labour-process, that in which his labour is no longer necessary labour, the workman, it is true, labours, expends labour-power; but his labour being no longer necessary labour, he creates no value for himself. He creates surplus-value which, for the capitalist, has all the charms of a creation out of nothing. This portion of the working-day, I name surplus labour-time, and to the labour expended during that time, I give the name of surplus-labour. It is every bit as important, for a correct understanding of surplus-value, to conceive it as a mere congelation of surplus labour-time, as nothing but materialised surplus-labour, as it is, for a proper comprehension of value, to conceive it as a mere congelation of so many hours of labour, as nothing but materialised labour. The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour, lies only in the

T h us surplus value could only arise from variable capital, not from constant capital, as labour alone created value. Put very simply, Marx's reason for thinking that the rate of profit would decrease was that, with the introduction of machinery, labour time would become less and thus yield less surplus value. Of course, machinery would increase production and colonial markets would absorb some of the surplus, but these were only palliatives and an eventual crisis was inevitable.

These first nine chapters were complemented by a masterly historical account of the genesis of capitalism which illustrates better than any other writing Marx's approach and method. Marx particularly made pioneering use of official statistical information that came to be available from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. A reader who finds the beginning of Capital too arid would do well to follow Marx's advice to Mrs Kugelmann1 97 and begin by reading the chapters on 'The Working Day', 'Machinery and Modern Industry' and 'Capitalist Accumulation'. In the chapter on 'The Working Day', Marx described in detail the 'physical and mental degradation'198 forced on men, women and children by working long hours in unhealthy conditions and related the bitter struggle to gain some relief by legal limits on the number of hours worked and the passing of factory acts. Although, Marx concluded, it might seem as though the capitalist and worker exchanged contracts in a free market, the bargain was, in fact, one-sided:

The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was no 'free agent' that the time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not loose its hold on him 'so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited'. For 'protection' against 'the serpent of their agonies', the labourers must put their heads together, and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death. In place of the pompous catalogue of the 'inalienable rights of man' comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make clear 'when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins'.199

Marx continued his indictment of capitalism in the chapter on 'Machinery and Modern Industry', describing the crippling effect of machinery on workers and the environmental effects of capitalist exploitation of agriculture.200 Summing up his conclusions, however, Marx showed that his view of technological progress under capitalism was not wholly negative:

We have seen how this absolute contradiction between the technical necessities of Modern Industry, and the social character inherent in its

capitalistic form, dispels all fixity and security in the situation of the labourer; how it constantly threatens, by taking away the instruments of labour, to snatch from his hands his means of subsistence, and, by suppressing his detail-function, to make him superfluous. We have seen, too, how this antagonism vents its rage in the creation of that monstrosity, an industrial reserve army, kept in misery in order to be always at the disposal of capital; in the incessant human sacrifices from among the working-class, in the most reckless squandering of labour-power, and in the devastation caused by a social anarchy which turns every economical progress into a social calamity. This is the negative side. But if, on the one hand, variation of work at present imposes itself after the manner of an overpowering natural law, and with the blindly destructive action of a natural law that meets with resistance at all points, Modern Industry, on the other hand, through its catastrophes imposes the necessity of recognising, as a fundamental law of production, variation of work, consequently fitness of the labourer for varied work, consequendy the greatest possible development of his varied aptitudes. It becomes a question of life and death for society to adapt the mode of production to the normal functioning of this law. Modern Industry, indeed, compels society, under penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of today, crippled by life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers.201

Volume One ended with a long section on 'Capitalist Accumulation' - the finest chapter in the book. The capitalist, being a prey to 'a Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation and the desire for enjoyment', was forced to create an 'industrial reserve army' or vast pool of temporarily unemployed workers to serve the fluctuations of the market. Marx synthesised his analyses in the thundering denunciation:

We saw, when analysing the production of relative surplus-value: within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labourprocess to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform

his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the the relative surplus-population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.202

This judgement was supported by a series of detailed studies, moving yet objective, on the condition of the British working classes over the previous twenty years, the British agricultural proletariat, and the misery of Ireland. The book was rounded off with the following famous passage:

Along with the constandy diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.205

The subsequent two volumes, being only in draft form, have none of the polished verve of Volume One. There was, however, a long chapter entitled 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production' that Marx seems to have intended to put at the end of Volume One but left out at the last minute.204 In this chapter Marx discussed how capitalist production reproduced the relationship of capitalist to worker in the total process. There are particularly interesting comments on the alienation involved in the relationship of capitalist to worker205 and on the tendency of capitalism to 'reduce as much as possible the number of those working for a wage' in the production sphere and increase the number of workers in purely service industries.206